BEIJING, Dec. 9 (Xinhua) -- Recent Nobel Peace Prize winners indicates the Norwegian Nobel Committee lacked sound analysis and even disregarded facts, a Norwegian pundit has said in a recent commentary.
Such flawed practices, Hege Ulstein said in the Saturday issue of local daily Dagsavisen, meant the foundation of the Nobel Peace Prize conferments in recent years was weak, including the latest one to a convicted Chinese criminal named Liu Xiaobo.
As evidence of the Nobel Committee's problematic approach, she cited a report by Norway's state broadcaster NRK about the controversy over Bangladeshi banker Muhammad Yunus, the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize laureate.
The NRK coverage revealed that, although Norwegian foreign aid agency NORAD and the foreign ministry warned as early as in 1998 that Yunus embezzled foreign assistance and his microcredit-providing Grameen Bank made some borrowers even poorer, the committee turned a deaf ear.
More worrisome, however, was how then Nobel Committee Chairman Ole Danbolt Mjoes and Norwegian Nobel Institute Director Geir Lundestad responded to the disclosure, Ulstein said.
Lundestad argued that, during his 20-year service at the Nobel Institute, nobody gained more credit from domestic and foreign experts than Yunus did. Yet his defense, Ulstein noted, gave birth to two troubling scenarios.
The Nobel Committee either paid no heed to information offered by the Norwegian foreign ministry, or did so awkward a job in background checks that it could not find problems, he said.
As to Mjoes' response that the committee "felt" that the awarding was a good thing, Ulstein noticed that Mjoes used "felt" instead of "thought," which she said implied that the committee just followed a feeling when choosing among the candidates.
From U.S. President Barack Obama in 2009 to Liu Xiaobo in 2010, the selections showed the Nobel Committee served as a cheerleader for Western leaders on the one hand and as a backer of opposition forces in Eastern countries on the other, Ulstein noted.
While the committee had many reasons to sing paeans to the United States and find fault with China, it suffered a fatal failure: its background checks focused merely on the nominees, not taking into account the whole global picture, she said.
The Nobel Peace Prize, she said, had become obviously biased in favor of the West, although eastern nations had been playing an increasingly important role on the international stage.
Why were Nobel concerts anchored by Hollywood stars from the United States instead of Bollywood stars from India? Did Western countries still think the center of the world was somewhere in the Atlantic? Ulstein asked.
Ambitious current Nobel Committee Chairman Thorbjoern Jagland intended to take part in some significant events to change the direction of the global development, but he often tripped over his own path, Ulstein said, citing the little and even negative effect of awarding Obama.
Jagland's calculation behind his choice of Liu Xiaobo, according to the Norwegian pundit, was that he wanted to show support for those who attempted to Westernize China.
But the decision was unwise because China's reform must follow the trend of the times instead of against it, she said, adding that the conferment also exposed the intrinsic inclination of the committee to lecture others and propagandize Western values.
Anyone who wanted to shape history must carefully and comprehensively discern the global situation and accept the fact that the world would embrace fundamental changes, Ulstein said.
Yet the fact that all the five members of the Nobel Committee were retired politicians at senior ages and lacked professional knowledge on the world situation would inevitably erode the meaning and glory of the Nobel Peace Prize, she said.
Should the committee continue making decisions against the tenet of the Nobel Peace Prize, Ulstein warned, the reputation of the award would do nothing but fall further.